You had a better definition of "Enabler" in your previous post. In all situations, not just family, an enabler is someone who gives credibility to "bad behavior". We saw this happen with the BLM protests where anti-social behavior was rationalized as productive.
In a family, it is especially not fair to say a person (usually spouse or parents) is an enabler for allowing bad behavior to occur. If a husband is a low performing employee with bad habits and low affection is a wife an enabler for staying with him? That seems to be an awfully unfair judgment. Now if the wife makes excuses for the behavior and facilitates access to alcohol and drugs then that is enabling!
To be precise, your language implies that unless the wife is "whipping the husband into shape" she is an enabler. To which I would say a husband staying with such a wife is an enabler of a narcissist.
Government and "woke" institutions have become not just enablers of bad behavior but promoters of it. These institutions embrace bad ideologies and then persist in them despite the obvious destruction those policies cause. Why is this happening?
What I discern is institutional moral decay. The people leading institutions do not trust their institutions to support them against the crazies and so the leadership enables the crazies to assume ever greater influence.
Seeing great companies fall to the same disease is astonishing. Hey Disney! What did you think would happen? But truth is there is no leadership at Disney to ask that question. The institution has fallen so far it truly believes accommodating wokeness (which is mainly extreme, individual selfishness) is the corporate objective.
The difference between your family analogy and the situation of "Enabler" profs is the game theory of the situation.
If you're in a toxic family, leaving will probably improve your life personally. So leaving is an optimal strategy even if threatening to leave doesn't make the other party improve.
On the other hand, if leaving means quitting (in protest?) your extremely stimulating and comfortable job, this is bad for you on net if you go through with it. It's also bad for the students you would have instructed, as one of the liberal profs, if you'd stayed at the job. So the only good reason to threaten to quit is if it would actually make a difference.
The only way that might work is with collective action, but of course you know almost no one else would join you. So the only reasonable strategy is what you're calling the "Enabler" strategy.
The way to get things done in an organization like a U is with collective action, but that requires coalition-building and then of course platforms get watered down. As of now, the Academic Freedom Alliance is about the best feasible collective action, and I'm proud to be a member.
There are a few individuals who have the power to make a difference, individually, against the objectionable aspects of DEI--folks with good credentials who have been rejected by public university jobs that require DEI statements, and who thus have standing to sue. I'm confident the current SCOTUS would rule, rightly, that these are compelled speech. Unfortunately becoming a plaintiff in such a lawsuit would mean professional and probably personal ruin, so I'm not sure if anyone has agreed to try it yet despite some public interest firms being on the lookout for good plaintiffs.
What about "Enablers" who have no power to issue an ultimatum about woke-ism? Is woke-ism different from any other wrong-headed policy someone in an institution opposes?
It's more accurate to say that DEI initiatives don't "lead to" racism; they ARE racism.
They rely on the premise that it is fitting and proper to think of people primarily as representatives of their racial, gender, ethnic, or other kinds of groups and to deal with them accordingly. That mindset is the prerequisite for all forms of bigotry. For unless you want to make the case that different racial groupings are equal in all relevant ways (and why make such divisions if that is the case?), then you necessarily attach some feature or value to them such that one is clearly worse than another. And by construction all members of any such group are tainted by their membership in it. There is no more fitting definition of racism and bigotry.
Is this a dichotomy or scale instead of just a pejorative? Your last personal example is positive enabling, or empowerment. Recruiting competent people that can do a job and grow beyond it. Those who can protect and build the organizations brand, be trustworthy, earn prestige. How many in the university are preference falsifiers and is this actually a silent majority? Is DEI viewed by a small majority now as empowering? Catching on because of civil rights law, diversity goals, and the ease at which one can establish dominance in organizations over those that question DEI. All within organizations that are bleeding credibility and prestige.
Can your "enabler" framework be generalized? Or is the framework under-theorized? I ask because it seems to me that many progressive educators subscribe to the theory that speech = trauma = violence, therefore silence = complicity. Your framework also suggests that silence = complicity. Perhaps in this case that is right, but I would like to see the positive obligation to speak up generalized. I suspect that that is not an easy case to make philosophically.
I think it is a shame that affirmative action isn't "by the numbers" a little more explicitly, an x point bump in the SAT, say, but not in an implicit, "dishonest" result goal.
Arnold,
You had a better definition of "Enabler" in your previous post. In all situations, not just family, an enabler is someone who gives credibility to "bad behavior". We saw this happen with the BLM protests where anti-social behavior was rationalized as productive.
In a family, it is especially not fair to say a person (usually spouse or parents) is an enabler for allowing bad behavior to occur. If a husband is a low performing employee with bad habits and low affection is a wife an enabler for staying with him? That seems to be an awfully unfair judgment. Now if the wife makes excuses for the behavior and facilitates access to alcohol and drugs then that is enabling!
To be precise, your language implies that unless the wife is "whipping the husband into shape" she is an enabler. To which I would say a husband staying with such a wife is an enabler of a narcissist.
Government and "woke" institutions have become not just enablers of bad behavior but promoters of it. These institutions embrace bad ideologies and then persist in them despite the obvious destruction those policies cause. Why is this happening?
What I discern is institutional moral decay. The people leading institutions do not trust their institutions to support them against the crazies and so the leadership enables the crazies to assume ever greater influence.
Seeing great companies fall to the same disease is astonishing. Hey Disney! What did you think would happen? But truth is there is no leadership at Disney to ask that question. The institution has fallen so far it truly believes accommodating wokeness (which is mainly extreme, individual selfishness) is the corporate objective.
The difference between your family analogy and the situation of "Enabler" profs is the game theory of the situation.
If you're in a toxic family, leaving will probably improve your life personally. So leaving is an optimal strategy even if threatening to leave doesn't make the other party improve.
On the other hand, if leaving means quitting (in protest?) your extremely stimulating and comfortable job, this is bad for you on net if you go through with it. It's also bad for the students you would have instructed, as one of the liberal profs, if you'd stayed at the job. So the only good reason to threaten to quit is if it would actually make a difference.
The only way that might work is with collective action, but of course you know almost no one else would join you. So the only reasonable strategy is what you're calling the "Enabler" strategy.
The way to get things done in an organization like a U is with collective action, but that requires coalition-building and then of course platforms get watered down. As of now, the Academic Freedom Alliance is about the best feasible collective action, and I'm proud to be a member.
There are a few individuals who have the power to make a difference, individually, against the objectionable aspects of DEI--folks with good credentials who have been rejected by public university jobs that require DEI statements, and who thus have standing to sue. I'm confident the current SCOTUS would rule, rightly, that these are compelled speech. Unfortunately becoming a plaintiff in such a lawsuit would mean professional and probably personal ruin, so I'm not sure if anyone has agreed to try it yet despite some public interest firms being on the lookout for good plaintiffs.
What about "Enablers" who have no power to issue an ultimatum about woke-ism? Is woke-ism different from any other wrong-headed policy someone in an institution opposes?
It's more accurate to say that DEI initiatives don't "lead to" racism; they ARE racism.
They rely on the premise that it is fitting and proper to think of people primarily as representatives of their racial, gender, ethnic, or other kinds of groups and to deal with them accordingly. That mindset is the prerequisite for all forms of bigotry. For unless you want to make the case that different racial groupings are equal in all relevant ways (and why make such divisions if that is the case?), then you necessarily attach some feature or value to them such that one is clearly worse than another. And by construction all members of any such group are tainted by their membership in it. There is no more fitting definition of racism and bigotry.
Is this a dichotomy or scale instead of just a pejorative? Your last personal example is positive enabling, or empowerment. Recruiting competent people that can do a job and grow beyond it. Those who can protect and build the organizations brand, be trustworthy, earn prestige. How many in the university are preference falsifiers and is this actually a silent majority? Is DEI viewed by a small majority now as empowering? Catching on because of civil rights law, diversity goals, and the ease at which one can establish dominance in organizations over those that question DEI. All within organizations that are bleeding credibility and prestige.
Can your "enabler" framework be generalized? Or is the framework under-theorized? I ask because it seems to me that many progressive educators subscribe to the theory that speech = trauma = violence, therefore silence = complicity. Your framework also suggests that silence = complicity. Perhaps in this case that is right, but I would like to see the positive obligation to speak up generalized. I suspect that that is not an easy case to make philosophically.
Agreed. What about all the enablers with Trump. Looks like the whole party is his enabler. Otherwise, Desantis would be the overwhelming choice.
I think it is a shame that affirmative action isn't "by the numbers" a little more explicitly, an x point bump in the SAT, say, but not in an implicit, "dishonest" result goal.